Page 41 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“That good, huh?” She stands there, reading me the way she reads a room she is about to run, then pulls the pen out of her hair and tosses it onto the nightstand. “Okay. Come here. But I should warn you—you’re wearing your negotiating face, and I’ve spent three weeks watching you with it, and honestly, I think it’s a bluff. I don’t think the control goes all the way down.”

“Thea—”

“There it is. The voice.” She backs toward the bed, one step, unhurried, her chin up, eyes bright with intent. “The careful hands. The measured everything. You’ve been managing me since the archive, and I keep wondering what happens if the management fails. What does it take for you to lose control? A war? A bad day at the office?” Another step back. Her mouth curves. “Or can you just not do it? Is that the secret? All mask, no⁠—”

The paperwork survives because I sweep it to the floor first. That is the last courtesy of the evening.

I take her wrist and pull her into me. Her heat warms me through, as if my blood wasn’t already boiling. My hand finds the hair at her nape and closes, tilting her face up, and the sound she makes cuts through the noise. “Say stop,” I tell her against her mouth, “and everything stops.”

“Don’t. Don’t give me Good Guy Max.” Her hands are already at my collar, wrecking the knot of my tie. “You can lose control with me.”

I can’t. She just doesn’t know that.

I take the ruined tie from her hands, and understanding arrives in her face one delicious second before I spin her, catch both wrists at the small of her back, and bind them with the silk.

Her breath goes ragged against the wall where I put her, cheek to the plaster, and I strip her from behind, shirt shoved up, sleep shorts down, my mouth at her ear taking its time while my hands do not. Her hot skin is addictive silk.

When my hand skates over her round ass, she whispers, “Oh God.”

I bend her over the foot of the bed with her wrists still bound and open her with my fingers, spreading her wide. Pink and glistening for me already. I blow on her there, and she swears into the blankets. Those dirty words get louder when I taste her like that, all helpless and at my mercy.

Sweet candy heaven on my tongue.

She dances against me and every time she gets close, I stop, so she calls me something filthy. Makes me smile every time.

I wait, and she learns her manners.

The third time she’s past all reason. She moans something that has surrendered language, and only then do I unleash myself and drive into her from behind. I keep one hand on her bound wrists, one on her hip.

There’s no patience left in me anywhere.

It’s not gentle. My hips slap against her ass, and she grunts like a wayward beast. The headboard knocks the wall, and behind the pleasure of it all, I vaguely wonder whether Pasha hears the sound.

Whether he would storm in here, in worry or jealousy.

Whether I would bother to stop.

She fights me for control the entire way down, and loses, and wins by losing. When I feel her start to break, I reach around and work her clit in rough circles. “Come for me, bratty girl.”

“No!”

“You want to. I can feel it. Come for me.”

“No!”

“Guess I’ll have to make you.” I dig down with my cock, grinding against her G-spot while I work her clit in that way she craves. “Right… fucking… now!”

She does, hard, wailing into the mattress, clamping around me so fiercely that I follow her over with my teeth in the birthmark at her nape and nothing in my head at all.

Nothing. A damn miracle.

I fumble to untie her wrists, then scoop up her shaking legs so her body is on the bed fully now. I rub the feeling back into her hands, and she flexes her fingers, face still in the blankets. This is all I ever want to do.

“There he is,” she says, hoarse. “I knew you had it in you. Better?”

“Yes.” Mostly. But she doesn’t need to know that.

“Towel?”